Keith Spore rose
to the top of the old Milwaukee Sentinel
as the paper’s editor at the time of its 1995 merger with the Milwaukee Journal to make what is today’s
daily newspaper in Wisconsin’s largest city. Then he rose further still –
becoming editorial page editor of the fledgling Journal Sentinel, then soon after its publisher, a post he held
until retirement.
(More recently, he quietly backed a short-lived effort to
run a rival slate of directors for Journal Communications in a proxy fight a
couple of years ago. The project was aborted when the Securities and Exchange
Commission ruled that the company didn’t have to list the alternate slate in
its official proxy statement.)
Now Spore is following a plot line familiar in the annals of
the ink-stained newsroom denizens: making the transition to fiction. And –
surprise – Journal Communications makes a fictionalized appearance. Or more
specifically, the company’s switch from employee ownership to a publicly traded
company does.
That’s not the center of the plot, though, which instead
tells the story of rival professional athletes.
At the request of Pressroom Buzz, Spore sent us a
description of Mad Momentum, sold on Amazon
as an ebook:
A dark and compelling
force reignites the bitter rivalry between two former NFL stars. Tommy
Lightfoote, once the game’s premier receiver, has become a devoted defender of
the down-trodden, his dream job. But his love life is in shambles, and he is
plagued by a recurring cloud of evil. He also has reason to believe that the
worst is yet to come. His nemesis, Lee Kondresiak, the most formidable
linebacker of his era, has achieved even greater success off the field, first
as a star of action films and later as a businessman with the Midas touch. When
Kondresiak sets his sights on politics, a murderous collision looms.
Beware the Power of Ojo.
The setting is
Millston, Wisconsin’s largest city. The backdrop of the story is a devious
effort to transform an employee-owned media firm into a publicly traded
company.
So, I wondered, how much of the story was based on real life
at the newspaper company Spore once worked for – or on anything else?
Actually, very little.
“Aside from the JRN transformation, the only real-life event
that inspired the story was something that I was told many years ago when I was
in the Army by a young black man from Louisiana,” Spore told me in an email
interview. “He discovered that we shared the same birthday, and he said that
people with the same birthday sometimes became bitter rivals for power.”
Spore’s follow soldier told him that his great-great-grandfather
had been a slave, brought from Africa, and was the source of that bit of lore.
“I thought that was wacky,” Spore says. “But, years later, I
stumbled onto an article about Santaria and the concept of ashé, a Yoruba word for the divine power
or life-force of the universe. Ashé
is obtained from the orishas (gods),
and this life-force gives people the power to solve problems, conquer their
enemies and gain love or money. The quest for ashé became the root of the bitter rivalry between the good guy and
the bad guy (who share the same birthday) in my tale.”
But don’t read the story expecting a thinly disguised
collection of portraits of old Journal
or Sentinel employees, says Spore.
While the employee stock ownership plan at his fictional Millston Mirror “shares many
similarities with the way the Journal
plan worked and the problems that ensued when employee stock-debt reached
worrisome levels,” Spore says, the similarities end there: “There are no
characters at the Millston Mirror who
are even remotely based on people at the Journal
or Sentinel.”
So how does it compare writing in a genre in which you make
things up instead of hunting down and printing facts?
That’s easy. “Fiction,” says Spore, “is both more fun and
more grueling than journalism.”
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